Thermal Giant Gravitons

TL;DR

This paper investigates the behavior of giant gravitons at finite temperature using the blackfold approach, revealing minimal angular momentum, stability properties, and potential comparisons with gauge theory thermodynamics.

Contribution

It introduces a generalized blackfold formalism for thermal giant gravitons and analyzes their stability, solution space, and thermodynamic properties at finite temperature.

Findings

Thermal giant gravitons have a minimal angular momentum and radius.

Two solution branches exist at given temperature and angular momentum, with different stability.

The free energy at low temperature is computed, enabling gauge theory comparisons.

Abstract

We study the giant graviton solution as the AdS_5 X S^5 background is heated up to finite temperature. The analysis employs the thermal brane probe technique based on the blackfold approach. We focus mainly on the thermal giant graviton corresponding to a thermal D3-brane probe wrapped on an S^3 moving on the S^5 of the background at finite temperature. We find several interesting new effects, including that the thermal giant graviton has a minimal possible value for the angular momentum and correspondingly also a minimal possible radius of the S^3. We compute the free energy of the thermal giant graviton in the low temperature regime, which potentially could be compared to that of a thermal state on the gauge theory side. Moreover, we analyze the space of solutions and stability of the thermal giant graviton and find that, in parallel with the extremal case, there are two available solutions for a given temperature and angular momentum, one stable and one unstable. In order to write down the equations of motion, action and conserved charges for the thermal giant graviton we present a slight generalization of the blackfold formalism for charged black branes. Finally, we also briefly consider the thermal giant graviton moving in the AdS_5 part.